The Ruthless Hand of Man
by Lil black dog
Summary: This story explores a very dark day in the life of a young Jim Kirk, the event that forever changed his outlook on life, and helped to mold him into the man he eventually became. Written for the 'Innocence' challenge at Ad Astra.


A/N: This story explores a very dark day in the life of a young Jim Kirk, the event that forever changed his outlook on life, and helped to mold him into the man he eventually became. Written for the 'Innocence' challenge at Ad Astra.

This ties into the TOS episode 'The Conscience of the King.' Those of you unfamiliar with it may want to peruse the synopsis at Memory Alpha, but I've done my best to allow this story to stand on its own.

**The Ruthless Hand of Man**

He stood, frozen in terror, eyes glued to the viewscreen on the wall, unable to scream or flee. It took everything he had not to be sick on the spot. People around him were stunned and incensed—some talking, some shouting, some crying, some utterly speechless, some gesticulating wildly. The armed guards were trying to silence the angry crowd, restore a semblance of order. "Shut up, the lot of you," the leader said, waving his gun back and forth as he trained it on the belligerent group before him. "You're the lucky ones, you've made the cut, but that doesn't mean we don't have orders to fry any of you who resist, or make trouble. Besides, we're only a third of the way through the executions at this point. Governor Kodos could change his mind about the fate of any one of you, given the right provocation." The man snickered. "Every one of you we kill means one less mouth to feed while we wait for rescue; it means more food for the rest of us, so don't hesitate to think that we won't do it."

The youngster heard none of this, however. The only sound that registered was static white noise, a dull roar that filled his head, blotting out everything else around him.

He rushed for the door to the room where they were being held with complete disregard for the knot of armed men guarding it, but large hands grabbed his arms, encircled his waist, halting his forward momentum, lifting him bodily off the floor.

"Lemme go! Lemme go!" he shrieked, arms flailing and legs kicking with abandon, but the person who had interceded on his behalf was stronger, held him fast, wrestled him to the ground.

"It's no use, kid. They've got phaser rifles

"But they _killed_ them!"

"Don't you think I know that?" his unidentified captor whispered harshly. "I just watched my wife and brother-in-law disappear into that barn, heard them being phasered into oblivion, but right now, there's nothing we can do about it. We've got to wait for the right moment. If we try anything now, we'll be as dead as the people we love."

That registered.

He went limp in the man's grasp. The people we love…dead. He choked on a sob as he thought of his Aunt Martha and Cousin Emma. He'd picked them out of the crowd as he and the other onlookers in this room—the high school gymnasium, now doubling as a large holding cell—had watched the events unfolding on the oversized viewer mounted on one of the walls. His only other family members on the planet had been marched into the immense, communal storage barn near the center of town, which housed the vast majority of the crops that were grown on the colony farms, by government soldiers. He saw his aunt and cousin enter hand in hand, heads held high, surrounded by an indiscriminate throng of people—the very young, the very old, men, women, whole families, partial families—people who had no idea of the fate that awaited them once inside. The situation was dire—all of the 8,000 inhabitants of Tarsus IV understood that when the blight had destroyed 90% of the colony's food supply three days ago—but they had trusted their leaders, were sure that the government would find a solution that would offer hope to everyone, would keep starvation from wiping out the colony as they waited desperately for help to arrive from the Federation—help that would take at least six weeks to reach them.

At the moment the crisis began, the colonists were separated into four groups, three of which were housed in school gymnasiums, the fourth in the sole large sporting facility in the colony's only town. The newly-appointed governor (the previous one had committed suicide at the outset of the catastrophe)—a man who called himself Kodos—had informed them that this was for everyone's safety, and was being done in order to prevent widespread looting and hoarding of food, until the ruling council could come up with a solution. In the meantime, the planet's small militia force, approximately one hundred strong, was to be sent house to house to gather what food remained and transfer it to a central holding facility where it would be rationed out in a few days.

Naïvely, none of the inhabitants—neither the ones being herded off to their deaths in groups of several hundred at a time, nor the ones deemed worthy of survival—had realized that that solution entailed the mandatory execution of half of the population, in order to ensure the continued survival of the remaining 4,000 colonists. But after sixty hours of forced separation, of being kept in the dark as to what was happening beyond their four walls, that was now horribly, excruciatingly clear to those left behind.

His thirteen-year-old mind, still numb from what he had just witnessed, struggled to process the grisly turn events had just taken. What had started out eight weeks ago as the trip of a lifetime, a dream that had been with him for as long as he could remember, had now morphed into a terrifying, surreal nightmare.

For him, space had always represented hope, security and the only conceivable path to his future. He'd dreamed of the day when he'd be able to leave the small corner of Iowa he called home and pursue a career in the infinite expanse of the cosmos. Up till now he had seen the galaxy at large as a place that would feed his need for exploration, allow him to experience both mental and physical challenges, and above all serve as a haven ready-made to embrace his adventurous spirit, but in the blink of an eye it had become dark, sinister, a place to be feared and avoided at all costs.

This trip to Tarsus IV represented his first chance to pursue that dream, his first opportunity to experience space travel and breathe the air of a truly alien world. His mother had been against it from the start; it was only thanks to the pleading and cajoling of his father that he was here at all.

What could go wrong? his father, George, a security chief in Starfleet himself, had insisted. Tarsus IV was a thriving, well-established colony, in existence for well over a decade, and George's sister, Martha, as a three-year member of Tarsus's population, had promised to keep her youngest nephew safe and out of trouble. Unable to resist the pressure exerted by both her son and her husband, his mother had acquiesced, and much to his delight, Jimmy was on his way.

His adventure had started off so well: He'd met Tommy Leighton on the shuttle en route to the colony world. Three years older, the boy had been going to stay with his father for the summer, and the two had hit it off instantly, forming a bond of friendship that would last well into adulthood.

He'd enjoyed the six-week journey there immensely, splitting his time on the interstellar liner between gazing at the wonders of the universe from the observation deck, hanging out on the bridge (turns out the captain was a friend of his father's), and learning about the ship's engines—he'd befriended the chief engineer, who had taken the lad under his wing and was more than happy to show off his workspace to such an eager pupil.

But all of that had come crumbling down in one macabre, incomprehensible instant. Now those words he had heard a few moments ago surfaced unbidden. Words spoken by a disembodied voice talking over images of hundreds of colonists being marched into what the survivors would later chillingly refer to as the abattoir, followed by the whine of phaser rifles, echoed dully in his head:

_The revolution is successful, but survival depends on drastic measures. Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives mean slow death to the more valued members of the colony; therefore I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered. Signed Kodos, Governor of Tarsus IV._

From this moment forth, those words would be forever burned into his brain, for you see, his innocence had died in that disturbing split second of comprehension—the innocence of youth. It was a casualty of Kodos's decree as surely as his aunt and cousin, and thousands of other colonists, had been. He never forgave the architect of the plan, nor forgot the ruthlessness and detached indifference which allowed Kodos to implement it without remorse. And yet, it was this one indelible moment from his youth that would turn out to shape the man he was destined to become. As is so often the case, innocence lost would lead to morality gained.


End file.
